_OceanofPDF.com_Wintering_-_Kate_Moses

in bare feet on the kitchen linoleum, or now, in undone boots—a request for a cookie or a puzzle or a cup of water echoing, empty of meaning, in her head. The clouds roil at the crest of Primrose Hill, concealing the receding western light. It’s there, but hidden, glowing now and then at the edges in slow, observable time. The sound of car horns ribbons up on the empty air from Prince Albert Road behind her. As the remaining light drains from Primrose Hill, unseen bulldozers scrape a space for the zoo’s new aviary on the far side of Regent’s Canal, cut their belching engines, are silent. Her fingertips, she distantly observes, must have worked the frog over the hard rubber toggle on Frieda’s boot. Frieda is swinging; the back of her red woolen coat comes and goes. With every push on her daughter’s weightless back, the grit beneath Sylvia’s shoe chafes, grinding, eating away the pavement underfoot, the leather of her sole. The earth is turning. Westward, toward her and the hill she faces, like a mill wheel scooping up days, holding them up to the sun for a moment at their zenith, then turning them out at her, drenching her with unwelcome recollection. As she stands on Primrose Hill, her back to the still and lightless flat on Fitzroy Road, the life she left behind begins to roll forward. All of London, now, falls away before her, sinking and glinting at the skyline; she can feel the inexorable marble turning of the earth beneath her feet. The Gothic, beaded towers of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, the serpentine Thames, the sinuous green downs of Salisbury Plain roll toward her, monumental and blank and ineffectual. The melancholy dolmens and toppled bluestone of Stonehenge, Bath’s lustrous golden facades relinquish the light as they sink from view. Past Exeter Cathedral’s helpless, faceless saints hugging their time-pocked columns come the elderberried hedgerows and patchwork hillsides of Devon, the fields of barley and the ragged cattle and her apple trees. Among them her

beehive, sheltered on its painted stand. Her garden, dying back under the giant elm. And then her house appears, her cobbled court and rotty thatch; the nine glazed panes of her French kitchen window rise and revolve away. The dank, moss-covered church rears up over the picket of lichened gravestones she could see from her study, laburnums, seemingly endlessly, through spring. The yew, as always, has caught the setting sun in its black-green needles. The butcher, the post office, the bridge over the river, the slate-roofed village flash forward, and suddenly she’s on a grassy hillside flanked by stone walls and hedgerows sprouting late dog roses, by the giant tufted fingers of a Victorian-era monkey puzzle tree at the gate, by stunted English oaks growing close to the ground. Not again: she’s standing at a swing set with a view of the purple mass of Dartmoor looming out of the patchwork heather, beyond the borders of the village playground. It is September, three months past, and she sees herself alone, speechless, pushing a child in a swing at sunset. It was September: a vicious and despairing time. Ted was gone, just gone—her mind raced ceaselessly, picking over dead conversations. Draping wet laundry across the steaming, cast-iron doors of the Aga, choking on the fraudulent cheer of her nursery teas, she rehearsed for future scenes—showdowns, pleadings—and analyzed merciless replays of recent ugly vignettes, already glittering malevolently in her memory. She agonized: what she should say, what she shouldn’t have said. What was the truth? She had desperately wanted to know. She couldn’t find it for the slipping of her mind. For all the stillness and silence she lived inside at Court Green, the hours and days she would go without hearing another adult voice, without speaking, she couldn’t escape the roaring in her ears. There were always the voices whispering their terrible, urgent advice. This is all she’d known then, killing time—a phrase whose accuracy made her wince—with her children at the village playground, the inescapable facts: Ted was having an affair. He was sleeping with Assia,

sleeping on floors in London to see her. Sylvia didn’t, beyond that, know where he was or what he would do. She had wanted to know it all—the truth, all of it—she knew there must be more. But in the glare of these particulars alone her mind was a bedlam of horrified torment and disbelief. Months later, standing in the cold London twilight, her face still flushes with shame: he knows everything about her. She has no secrets— he’s always known more than she has known herself. Where would it go now, all that was her, now that he didn’t want it? Her children are still swinging. Still, Sylvia stands by absently, one cold hand clenched deep in her pocket, letting their movements, the shapes of their bodies against the fence, the incremental slump of Frieda’s socks wash by her. In September she’d written her mother about the majestic view of Dartmoor from the playground, as if that made her life less forlorn, less cramped and scared. What was it he had said to her? His words had fallen like blows, and now she couldn’t remember. It was too exhausting to concentrate on the hard things, the elemental truths of the self. She couldn’t then, and she can’t now—she notices again how her self slips away, uncatchable except by the most strenuous effort. It was slippery, the self, like a baby in a bath. That’s all she needs. All, more likely, that she can manage: a bath. Hot as hell. As hot as she can stand, tropical, so hot she breaks a sweat. So hot and long her fingers pucker. Scalding hot, a brandy’s sting—she’d have a brandy too, a cat’s eye in the tub: the burning and the numbing, a fossil stiff in amber. The little deaths of all these leaves: the stunted oaks, the London planes, rolling by in tatters on the grass; she dreads this recycling of days. The shadows of her children are flying out over Dartmoor, over the rooftops of London, out over the world as she watches. The older boys have vanished, teased back into the dark by their invisible mothers. All along Fitzroy Road the other mothers will be just preparing their suppers

as she heads back with her children to their dark flat. Eyes downcast, her scarf pulled close, she’ll pass the glowing, knee-high windows of the garden flats and see all those other mothers headless at their cooking. They’ll be chopping their vegetables, making their stews, ringing their puddings with cream on the other side of the steamy basement glass. OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER TEN “The Jailor” DECEMBER 14, 1962 LONDON Framed within the glossy red grid of a jubilee telephone kiosk is a twoyear-old girl wearing a carmine coat as red as the booth in which she stands. Her smaller brother is balanced on a chrome-edged shelf meant to hold parcels, and her mother is dropping coin after coin into the phone box. From her circumscribed spot on the kiosk’s damp, cast-iron floor, the little girl looks out onto the hill where she played last evening, now blanketed in a layer of blue fog hovering thickly over the grassy slopes and sports fields like a sterile sheet of cotton batting. The morning rain continues to fall, a cold, steady mizzle dribbling irregular trails down the glass-paned kiosk windows with their streaky views of Primrose Hill. The pennies chink in the coin box; her brother is starting to cry. Outside on the corner, his pram is soaking wet. Her mother pulled the bonnet up, but the gabardine cover would not snap closed over the pillowcases of dirty laundry she had piled into the bassinet. She hunches into the telephone, away from the public indictment of her soggy buggy parked on the corner of Regent’s Park Road for all to see. Sylvia’s umbrella, snagged on the hook so thoughtfully provided by the General Post Office, is dripping steadily into the top of her overshoe. Nicholas is struggling, whining and grasping at her wet coat; she holds him firmly on his high awkward seat in the crook of one arm and flips the

worn pages of her address book with the other hand. No one, no one is answering. Not the mothers who used to meet in the gardens in front of her old flat, the ones who could seamlessly carry on a conversation while digging out of a baby’s mouth sand from the box where the neighborhood cats buried their hard little turds. Not the wives of the poets with whom she exchanged recipes or sly asides, not the poets themselves. Not the Telephone House, where her application for service was filed over a month ago. If she could set up just one tea, one visit— The pennies fall and return. No answer comes. The ringer drills its pointless holes into empty space. The neighborhood has gone steely and lusterless in the rain, which has gradually seeped under Sylvia’s clear plastic cap and into her thick hair as she stands at the phone, and now trickles in cold rivulets over her stiffening scalp. Even this simple plan—the launderette, setting a date for a visit with friends, maybe a baby-minder engaged for a few hours—is a death by a thousand cuts. She’s scuttled with the loaded pram, dragging Frieda from the shelter of tree to dripping tree down the footpath at the edge of the park, looking for the nearest public phone; her skull crinkles, fragile and papery as the abandoned husk of an insect after the sevenhour stupor of her sleeping pills. It’s just her luck to find the phone here: mere steps from Dido Merwin’s disapproving front door on St. George’s Terrace. She’s passed this corner what must be hundreds of times in the past, to and from dinners at the Merwins’ a block and a half from Chalcot Square. But she never noticed the box at the foot of Dido’s street; she’d never needed it before. And now she’s got no choice but to use it, crouching in the shadow of a woman who’s never liked her, her soiled linens in the street. The doorways to the shops on Regent’s Park Road are garlanded with meaningful swags of greenery, blatant seductions for holiday shoppers. Colored lights blink garishly in the windows of the flats above. A girl in

The Queens Head, the pub across the street, is wiping a tabletop with a filthy rag and staring at her through the window. Sylvia turns her back, searching her book for someone else she might call. Dido is out of the question; now that Ted was gone, there was no reason to keep up the pretense of friendship, a pretense Dido most decidedly abandoned when she offered, unasked, to house Ted. The windows of the phone box have begun to cloud, fogging up with the heat of three damp bodies. Her mother in Wellesley (fast asleep, thank god, no temptation there), the solicitor: both just as risky as the only other choice she’s got left, and nearly as expensive. She turns to the front of the address book, just out of curiosity—not because she’s going to use it—looking for the loose scrap of paper on which she wrote the number of Dido’s mother’s flat, where Ted is staying. The back of an envelope, blue airmail, the thick uneven line of her Sheaffer pen—she knows exactly what the paper looks like, the deckled edge where she tore it from the aerogram, but it’s not there. It’s not in the back of the book either, not tucked between the pages. She can almost see the number in her mind, she’s looked at it so many times, willing the solitary girlish aperçus and Arabic loops of her intent penmanship to reveal something other than the practical: some divination, a sign. She checks again, more slowly, fanning the onionskin pages under her fingertip, Nicky crying at her side and attempting to crawl down on his own. It’s disappeared, slipped from the book. And there’s no one left to call but Ted. Cautiously, hugging Nicholas whimpering at her neck, Sylvia leans to the right, edging beyond the glass-encased RATES & INSTRUCTIONS poster, which shields her partly from view, to glance cautiously up Dido’s short, sloping lane and its block-long row of grand houses separated from Primrose Hill by its own hairpin strip of garden. None of the curtains is moving. Still, Sylvia can feel the prim Palladian reproach of St. George’s

Terrace. Lord Byron’s scandalized widow died here a hundred years ago, humiliated; she read it in a biography last month. She’s sure Dido told her that Robert Frost had chucked her under the chin here as a baby. Or maybe that wasn’t here; maybe Dido had snagged this manse from one of her several discarded husbands. The nerve of her judgments! No wonder Dido is sheltering Ted; she and Assia have so much common ground. By what unearned privilege has Dido come by this house with its view of the hill? Sylvia had always found Dido’s tales of bored superiority, crammed with obscure allusions and multilingual self-flattery, hard to take, let alone to keep straight. Dido’s nonchalant sense of privilege bred an overbearing generosity that only succeeded in making Sylvia feel meager and resentful. She’s trying now to cantilever the phone directory up onto the writing shelf, to look up Dido’s mother—if she could just remember her last name. Had she ever known Dido’s maiden name? It’s probably of little consequence: who could know how many times Dido’s mother herself had been married. She slaps the directory shut. She’s got no choice. Again she picks up her address book, this time running her forefinger over the tabs to “M.” She reads and quickly memorizes the number, turns the book over to keep her place, and reaches into her coat pocket for fourpence. Her finger traces a modulating crescent over and over on the dial, the chrome disc ticking back each time into place. A pause, and then the double burr. “Hullo,” answers Dido’s throaty, smoker’s voice. Quick, a deep breath—poised and cool: “Dido, it’s Sylvia.” “Sylvia,” Dido drawls out, exhaling through her nose. Sylvia can just picture her: standing in her marble-surfaced kitchen, tapping her everpresent cigarette pack. One bony hand on her hip, the boyish slouch and wide red hairband, a halo of smoke ringing her flawless black bob. “How nice of you to call. Where are you these days?” “I’m in Devon.”

“Oh,” Dido says, breathing evenly into the phone. “I thought you were back in London.” “No—” Sylvia answers. The muscles in her neck contract. “Did you get your telephone replaced, then?” Dido asks. The calculated malice! “No,” Sylvia responds, “I’m calling from a public kiosk.” “That’s astounding,” Dido says, “as there’s a baby pram looking just like yours, the one we bought for you, in front of the phone box on the corner here on Regent’s Park Road. Filled with bags of money, it would seem, from the look of it.” Except for the muffled gasps of Nick’s weeping into her coat collar, there is only foreboding silence from Sylvia’s end of the telephone line. “In fact,” Dido continues, “there’s a charming little girl in the box I can see from my window who appears to be the very image of my lovely goddaughter, and she’s licking the glass. What’s all that crying about?” Swinging Nicholas onto her hip, Sylvia tucks her chin into the earpiece of the phone, holding it steady, and reaches down to take Frieda’s hand, easing her away from the kiosk glazings. She quickly wipes her fingertips first across Frieda’s warm wet tongue, then onto the seat of her own wool coat. Her hand comes back wetter. “Would you like to bring the children in out of the rain?” Dido asks. “I’ve still never seen the baby.” “No thank you,” Sylvia says. It’s no use. She pauses, just long enough to kick dirt over her composure. “Dido, I’ve only called because I need Ted’s number.” Dido takes a long drag on her cigarette. “Well, Sylvia, I’m not at all sure I should risk giving it to you. He’s staying at my mother’s flat, you know, and I fear you may start badgering her housemaid as you did my cat-minder this fall when Ted was staying here.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Sylvia scoffs. She—the downright lies! She hardly called at all—the cat-minder hung up on her twice, and she could hear Ted’s voice in the background— “If only it were so,” Dido replies. “And I can’t risk having her quit now, as I’ve only got until the end of the year to finish an inventory and get the rest of my mother’s furnishings off to the auction house.” “So Ted will be moving again,” Sylvia interjects, careful to keep her voice hollow with indifference. “I would guess so, unless he’d like to stay on in an utterly barren set of rooms,” Dido answers dispassionately. “Which might not sound unsatisfactory to him, come to think of it, after this fall.” Nicholas is bawling into Sylvia’s sweater, rubbing his head into the lapels of her coat. She can hardly hear over his hiccuping sobs. “Whatever do you mean by that?” she asks raggedly, struggling with her voice, running her palm over the back of Frieda’s hair where she’s buried herself against her mother’s skirt. Again Dido inhales deeply, her voice tight and adenoidal as she begins to speak. “I only mean that after the endless harangues and accusations you’ve been hurling at him the last few months, perhaps if you’d give him some peace he’d have a chance to think this through.” “It’s already thought through,” Sylvia replies, holding her body as rigid as the phone. “I’m getting a divorce.” “Well, if that’s the case,” Dido answers blandly, “you’ve nothing left to badger him over. Let your solicitor do it.” “I’m calling him for the children, Dido,” Sylvia confides, convincing even herself, her attention diverted by the shock of Dido’s easy reference to a solicitor. Has Ted said something? What has he said? Everyone must know: they’re nothing but formalities to each other now. She feels suddenly chilled, the puddle in her overshoes leaching its way up her heavy knit tights. The morning marketers parade by, swinging their

lumpy mesh bags and peering moonfaced through the distorting glass of the kiosk as they pass. “… on my way over there now,” Sylvia hears Dido responding, her voice not exactly friendly, but slackened, like her jaw-line before her facelift, “just waiting for a mover to arrive to pick up a few trunks and old relics I’ve decided to ship off to the auction house as well. Winter cleaning, you might say. I’ll be staying at my mother’s as well until I leave for New York. We’ve leased this house through the spring. I’ll let Ted know.” Success, such as it is. Sylvia tastes a sudden rusty flavor of doubt at the back of her throat. “Please tell him not to come until Monday,” she responds. “I’m busy with guests this weekend,” she adds, collecting herself. “Of course,” Dido answers, inhaling. “If that’s all, then—” “Yes. Oh—Dido—” Sylvia says with overdone breathlessness, a sloppy attempt to mask her secondary agenda, another favor, as spontaneous thought. She cringes at herself: why does she even bother? Dido will sniff her out like a dog. “Millie—” she continues, “—your old cleaner. Does she still work for you?” “Then you do have bags of money in your pram—” Dido says, exhaling smoke through her nose. “Don’t be ludicrous,” Sylvia answers irritably. “I’m working my fingers to the bone and I’ve got little to show for it, certainly not from Ted. But if I can get a mother’s helper, I will have bags of money. I absolutely must find a nanny right away. I hoped Millie might do some baby-minding for me as she did when Frieda was small.” “Like everyone, Millie loves Frieda, and I’m sure she’ll love little Nicholas,” Dido says evenly. “No need for the hysterics. I’ll have her ring you.”

“My telephone hasn’t been connected,” Sylvia says, her face growing hot. “Oh,” Dido says, the sound of her cigarette box tapping again on the countertop. “You do have bad luck with phones. Then give me your address. I’ll tell her to stop around.” “I’m at number twenty-three Fitzroy Road,” Sylvia responds formally, “Yeats’s house.” “Yeats’s house?” Dido repeats in disbelief. “You’ve come back to this district? More than that—you’ve moved right back into the neighborhood.” “Of course I came back,” Sylvia answers. “This is my home—my other home. My doctor is here—” “My doctor, you recall, to whom I recommended you as a patient—” Dido corrects. “He delivered Frieda,” Sylvia responds, peremptory. “My favorite shops, my grocer, my parks, all that I love is here.” There is a pause, broken only by the sound of Dido inhaling. “More than you know,” she says. “Perhaps too close for comfort.” “There’s nothing I don’t know,” Sylvia snaps. Something, maybe her certitude, clatters in her chest. Dido smokes, holding the phone in silence. “All right, Sylvia,” she finally answers, her voice receding and skeptical. “‘Whatever flames upon the night / Man’s own resinous heart has fed.’” “Don’t quote Yeats to me,” Sylvia says, imperious. “That’s why I came. I know what I’m doing.” As she hangs up the phone, Sylvia turns around, holding Nicholas, pink-faced and blotchy, his little body heaving with residual sobs, her own blood thumping. A phone slam: a pathetic, gutless gesture. Her damp skin prickles with disquiet. The rain continues to fall, the sky congested and close. This can’t go on: her future arrested, held in suspense by the weather, the barren, the absentees, public humiliations

she can’t escape. She’s got to get her own phone, a lifeline. It’s Friday, nearing noon. Lunch hour, then afternoon naps for the children. She could lose the whole day, stuck at home in the dying light, like yesterday. Then the weekend, two more days incommunicado, a prisoner. The laundry will wait. “All right,” Sylvia mutters to herself, scanning the street. The canvas awnings over the shops are dark and saturated, the scalloped overhangs sheeting with rain. Before her, across Regent’s Park Road, a short lane of narrow houses cuts through to Chalcot Road and beyond, past her new flat, to the post office at the corner of Princess Road—spanning the length of the entire four-block-long district, a much faster route than the park road’s broad curve along the perimeter of Primrose Hill. She knows what she’s doing. “All right,” she says aloud, gathering her address book and coin purse and sliding her pocketbook over her wrist, leaning her free elbow against the door of the booth. “We’re making a run for the post office. Quick like bunnies,” she says to the children, hurrying to the pram and pushing back the bonnet, revealing a miraculously dry spot for Nicholas to sit behind the pillowcases of drenched laundry. She swivels her head protectively up and down Regent’s Park Road, over her shoulder toward the intersection of Primrose Hill Road and the faster traffic behind them, before gripping Frieda’s hand and darting with the pram across the street. The useless umbrella, requiring one more hand than she has available, is furled and tucked beside Nicholas in the pram; her head in its plastic cap is tucked toward her chin against the rain as she hurries with Frieda down her shortcut’s footpath, the old familiar stones beneath her feet a mosaic of slate and the browned lace skeletons of leaves. It’s a route she knows by heart but has avoided for days now as she’s taken the long way around, the safe way, by the park. By the park she loves, yes, its single rolling crescendo of hill stippled with centurion trees, but the long way,

the way of circumvention, the way she was walking, warily, hurrying then as well, to her doctor’s office when she’d seen Yeats’s house for lease. It was not just a path of avoidance, out of her way, the farthest route from the tube station, the shops, the phone box: a month ago it was also a manifest sign, a legitimate omen. It was the route she took to find her new life, circling at the edges of her old one. Shoulders clenched below her coat collar, Frieda’s hand beneath hers on the handle, Sylvia pivots the pram at the half-block angle in the lane and pivots again a few houses down, turning onto Chalcot Road. She looks straight ahead: she’s just a block from her own new corner, then another block, broken by a mews or two, from the post office. She can do this route, too. She knows what she’s doing, the pastel houses lined up like children’s toys around the garden square—no reason not to—the familiar swing and the mothers’ benches at her left shoulder now, no one on the street—it’s raining, it’s a work day—her old flat on the right, its Doriccolumned entrance like a sentry box. She dares not look up toward the third-floor windows, the little flat overlooking Chalcot Square where Frieda was born, just a block away from where she lives now. “Let’s hurry, Frieda,” she calls to her daughter, breaking into a trot, passing as fast as she can through this no-man’s-land, the nineteen houses between her old flat, where her husband’s lover lives, and her new home, her new life in Yeats’s house on Fitzroy Road, barely out of sight on the other side of the next street. *   *   * The flimsy corner door swings in and bangs, jangling the chimes hung above it, as Sylvia shoves the pram through the doorway, maneuvering over the jamb and into the Princess Road post office. She stops just inside the door to untie her rain cap and stamp her boots on the mat; Frieda stamps, too. On a table set to the side, within free reach of customers, lie

baskets for various classes of letters, brochures and forms, and several scales, one with individual lead weights and a bowl in the shape of a silver urinal. At the far end of the room, a long hardwood counter with chipped moldings spans the full length of the storefront, from the misty picture window facing the street to the cashier’s grate at the other end. A threefoot-high wire mesh topped with brassy finials encloses the counter, protecting shelves stocked with twine, envelopes, gum erasers, pots of ink, and glue. A tall, middle-aged clerk with greasy hair sits in a criminal hunch behind the bars, his thick assiduous fingers stacking matchsticks into an elaborate model deployed on a sheet of newspaper. He doesn’t look up at the sound of the opening door. “Excuse me, sir,” Sylvia says, approaching the clerk while pulling off her gloves by the fingertips. “I would like to speak with the telephone manager.” Smiling, friendly but firm. The clerk looks up, blinking, holding the burnt tips of two matches in midair. “There’s no telephone manager here, madam. You’ll need to ring the head postmaster at the district office.” He looks down again, carefully dipping the matchsticks into a glue pot and affixing them to his model. “No, you see,” Sylvia continues, leaning into the mesh railing, her gloves dangling from one fist, “I have been ringing the district postmaster. I need my telephone to be installed, and my request for service has been on file for a month. I’ve got the letter of confirmation, and it says my service was to be hooked up ‘as quickly as possible.’ All of my forms have been filed through this post office.” “Well then, madam,” says the clerk, putting down his matches and resting his huge meaty hands on his thighs, seeming pleased with the assurance of satisfactory performance from all sides, “it appears your paperwork is all in order, then, and you merely need to wait for the engineers to ring you for an appointment. I’ve no doubt you’ve made it onto the waiting list, as the letter you received confirms.”

“Waiting list?” Sylvia asks suspiciously. “The letter said nothing about a waiting list. It simply said my order was to be processed as quickly as possible.” The bells over the door chime unevenly behind her. “And that, indeed, madam,” the postal clerk responds, rising from his stool in arthritic segments, like a metal chaise unfolding or a stork lifting jerkily into the air, “means that you’ve been put on the list, and now you are waiting.” He spreads his wide, flat-nailed fingertips on the counter and smiles paternally. Sylvia stares at him. “But this is preposterous. I don’t see why I must continue to wait; I need a telephone now, and I’m willing and able to pay. I have small children,” she says, waving an arm in the direction of the pram, where Nicholas has fallen heavily asleep against the laundry, his face tearstained, his mouth a slack pink O. Frieda stands beside him, gripping the pram, sucking the wet end of her mitten, her eyes wide, startled by the sudden blare of her mother’s voice turned in her direction. Sylvia gives the clerk an uncompromising look, tapping her nails on the counter. “I simply insist,” she says meaningfully, “that my telephone be hooked up.” The postal clerk’s smile sets, becoming just perceptibly hard. He runs one hand over his thinning, slicked hair. “I daresay you’d have your line if you were back home in America, madam,” he replies, pausing for emphasis, “but this is a country nearly bankrupt by the war. It may seem far off to you, but it is not to Englishmen. Our telephone service is state run, and there’s only a certain amount of money set aside for telephones each year. It’s the end of the year. We’ve run out of money. You can thank the Germans for your lack of a telephone.” Sylvia’s cheeks burn. She feels the heat of other bodies in the room, the soft feathery sound of breathing behind her. She lowers her voice, leaning farther toward the clerk. “Please, sir,” she pleads, her tone

solicitous and meek, “there must be some way I can get a phone. Could I pay the quarterly tariff now? What if I pay for the full year of service?” The clerk is shaking his head as Sylvia speaks. He continues to shake it, a look of mournful discouragement on his face as he tells her, “I’m afraid that won’t help. You see, young lady, there are certainly other customers ahead of you on the waiting list. It wouldn’t be right to serve you first. It just isn’t done.” “But I have small children—” she says plaintively. “I’m alone.” She whispers to the clerk, her lips nearly touching the wire bars. “My husband is dead.” “I’m very sorry, madam,” the clerk says, still shaking his head. He pauses, his chin just wagging. He sighs, lifting his eyes to Sylvia. “Have you considered shared service? The waiting list is generally shorter.” “That’s a party line?” she asks cautiously. The clerk nods. “You might get service by January.” “January?” Sylvia exclaims, deflated. “How long will it be otherwise?” “For your own service?” says the clerk. “February. No later than March.” Sylvia groans, leaning her forehead against the mesh. “But I can’t wait that long,” she moans, feeling her face sliding out from under her control, her eyes filling and salty. “I can’t wait,” she says, looking up at the clerk again. “I have to have a phone. I’m trapped. I’m alone,” she says, gritting her teeth, trying to stem the impulse to cry. “What if I need to call for help? There’s got to be something you can do.” “Surely you can get help from a neighbor,” the clerk responds, his voice blandly hopeful. “How can the engineers ring me for an appointment?” Sylvia asks angrily. “I’ve got no phone.” She straightens her back, takes a deep breath, begins to turn on her heel, and finds that all she sees is filmy with tears.

“Madam, I assure you there’s nothing I can do,” the clerk says to her as she is turning from the counter. “You’ll get your phone. If it’s any comfort to you,” he says, smiling wanly, “I can tell you that this process is entirely out of our control.” At the door, at the end of the vague, glassy line of postal customers she sees as through the back of a waterfall, a man holding a dark spongy newspaper he’d tented over his head steps aside. Sylvia pulls Nicky’s hat down over his ears, his sleeping face hot and flushed under her icy hands. The bells jingle as they leave, stepping out into the rain on the corner, turning back and retracing their steps in the steady drumming rain. Under her feet, the wet flagstones of the footpath: buckling with tree roots, stained with the tarry gravel of workmen, catching her heel, laid randomly slab to slab as they are in Yorkshire cemeteries. She looks up, livid, panicky: Chalcot Road opens before her, or closes. From the point where she stands far into the wavery, watery distance, at the road’s end, identical houses line each side of the street, the creamy, three-story classical facades of the houses exactly the same, the columns and Georgian cornices and sooty terra-cotta chimney pots alike, the black wrought-iron railings following each other end to end in domino order, repeating down the street and receding to a vanishing point three blocks away. Fitzroy Road has disappeared, off to the side, unseeable, offstage. In the silvery wash of the distance, she sees herself reflected in tear drop, all the way down the street as in a hall of mirrors, her selves growing smaller and smaller, her tiny faces turned in surprise, or turned in something, an expression she doesn’t want to see, the last little face centered precisely over Chalcot Square, hovering, a captive of her past. OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER ELEVEN “Cut” OCTOBER 24, 1962 COURT GREEN Pot at a boil, kitchen steam, onion dice, blade— This is silent astonishment, Sylvia pale at her butcher block, the knife dropped as if burning, clattering, the tip of her thumb sliced off. The baby still beats his tray, the two-days’ nanny takes her handheld tour of the toy box. Blanching, her face and her thumb, and sensation held in suspense: no pain, no fear, no shock. Twilight itches the windows. Church bells go off like a clock. And then the blood comes. Oozing red, seeping up to the surface, dark and bright and thick, welling at the sheared top of her thumb without spilling, a shiny crimson dome engorged and rising, and then the flood. And then the flood. Twenty-eight days—a phase of the moon, the agony drag. The spurt, the pad, the jangling belt. The dangling flap to hide in her skirt. She was bloody, cursed and dirty, answered the door on moon-day to her pretty young nurse, a fat pad snagged to elastic between her legs. Hardly dressed for a week. Cramping gut, cramping womb, her head hot, and her lungs a rattling muck. Oh, her lungs, they hurt. They hurt, the twenty-eight days since his cruel desertion, a month of mothering her fatherless son. One last chance: in Ireland, but he cut it off. He cut her dead.

Blood is running down her wrist. She pulls back the sleeve of her blouse. “Sue?” she calls to the young nurse, her new nanny, in the playroom. “Sue?” she calls, her voice distant and thin. And what’s come since? The sleepless dark, and flu, and poetry: all she’s eaten, all she’s slept. Twenty-one poems in twenty-eight days. She’s burned through them, burned with fever, day after day, hit the mother lode, the richest vein. My god, think—it’s the real red thing. Sue, glimpsed through the doorway, is smiling, laughing, her head at an endearing tilt, on her hip on the red rug with Frieda. A felted duck, a squeaky cat in her lap, a pile of grubby dollies at her knees. Nicholas bounces in a walker, crowing, banging his block. Sue’s head turns frame by frame: in the kitchen Sylvia’s slim, elegant arm is held up like a jewelry model’s, blood cascading off her elbow, flush upon flush. The relief of blood—the ache, the break of tension. Something came loose, slipped free— Sue stands, saying something mild to Frieda, who turns back to the toy box to dig. Sue stops in the kitchen, presses Sylvia’s right forefinger to the nearly severed flap of skin at the top of her cut thumb, asks where to find bandages and iodine. Blood is pooling in the chopped onions. The bee poems. “The Jailor.” “A Secret.” It didn’t surprise Sylvia that it was so often likened to childbirth. She’d thought the same, even as a teenager, smugly appropriating a metaphor she hadn’t earned. Even after the babies were born, she thought she knew. She didn’t know at all, until now. It was both—sex and birth. Sex—not the shared experience, but the private one. The pleading desperation, the sweaty fury, the greed, the full heat of surrender. But it was birth most of all. “Lesbos.” “A Birthday Present.” “Stopped Dead.” With Frieda, she’d had nothing for the pain, on her knees on the bedroom floor: its barreling, breathless violence unmitigated. Even with Nick, the midwife’s portable tank of gas had run out. Then she was pushing. This, too, was how she felt the poems: the

brutality, wave after wave of it. And then, oh god, she felt the head. Were all the doors open? Were the windows? The plates of the skull folding, slipping tectonically like a world, to get through her bones. The thrill—it was irreducible, the only true thing. It was glorious. Blood is pooling in the onions. Sue has the gauze, the root-beer glass tincture of iodine. The blackberry blood of childbirth, richer than earth. Birth and poetry: the signs of her true womanhood smearing her thighs, dark drops on the plank floor of the guest room as she rises. Her body the body of a woman delivered, glowing in moonlight at her desk, the moon rising out of the yew beyond her study. Sylvia takes a step back, steps in the dark drops of ruby blood on the kitchen linoleum. The decapitated cap of her thumb pulses under her fingertip, a little animal, with every beat of her heart. Sue holds the iodine, ready to douse Sylvia’s thumb. “It’s going to hurt,” Sue warns. Sylvia lifts her forefinger, sticky with blood. Holds out her thumb. At the first red splash of iodine, she winces. The sting, it’s real— (Sue holds the bottle steady.) Do it again. OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER TWELVE “Elm” APRIL 19, 1962 COURT GREEN Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable. My poor house, she thinks ruefully, watching coal smoke chug and curl from one of the two brick chimneys at the crest of her thatched roof. The elm tree beyond it waves and clacks as if for rescue in the high, gusting wind that has been blowing all night, the tiny, heart-shaped leaves so fresh on the branches they’re almost undetectable from this distance. Only twigs, black sticks, the tree bursting skyward into the chimney smoke, all of its frayed nerves on edge. Sylvia stands in the hard rain’s hush, under a contracted, cold noon sky. Now and then the wind blows stinging pricks of icy rain up into her face as she holds her umbrella and watches from the soggy green churchyard overlooking her soggier front lawn, where the workmen who are sealing her floors have piled their sacks of gravel and bitumen and cement. It’s another tempest, another spongy April day of pitiless English weather, another day without spring. Restless, she holds her umbrella and slowly paces the boundary between the church grounds and Court Green, peering down the sloping bank of the cob retaining wall faced with unquarried rubble, stepping back and forth between the tilting pickets of collapsed gravestones re-erected at her property line and the uneven rows behind, all of them grown mossy and mineral stained, their faces etched by spreading patches of vividly colored lichen: orange, red,

mustard gold. The steady, deafening hiss of the incessant storm is punctuated now and then by the forlorn bleats of animals, cows and sheep, left out to graze or stand numbly in the rain. “Why did you stay?” she was asked last week; the interviewer came down from London to record her for a radio program on Americans who live in England. Why indeed? It certainly wasn’t for the weather or the closeness of the sea, though maybe she once thought it would be. All she could think of was the miserable Yorkshire seaside resort Ted had taken her to the year they were married, the charmless boardwalk clotted with chip papers and squabbling gulls, the muddy flat slurp of the ocean. The people on preposterous holiday in their raincoats, huddled in blackened inns. The tape recorder clicked chidingly on the parlor tabletop; she stopped herself short of saying something truly insulting. Her in-laws would in all likelihood listen to the BBC broadcast, and so, she had newly realized, would her neighbors. No, she told him, she stayed for the butchers: the English butchers who cut things up while you watch. Theirs was a dismemberment she could follow as she’d follow a narrative: knowing then where everything went, where everything goes, not the blank ignorant horror of wondering where all that blood came from. Not the cunning hermetic miracle of America. After years of British life it still struck her as so blatant, seeing whole pigs hooked by their trotters and turning at the ceiling, she feeling sick looking up at them, fascinated, sawdust clogging her shoes, the pigs revolving, lurid, blinking off and on like a red light district. She told him she stayed in England because it wasn’t America. She made a joke of it, but she’d meant it: she was shrugging off American rules. She wanted her own rules, out in the open. And Ted’s, of course— they could live as they pleased, as writers. Ted had hated teaching as much as she did; it was a long, slow death with an audience. Here, she could have her mornings in her study, she could birth her babies at home,

she could walk in the scudding rain while Ted made lunch; she could do as she liked. It was all up to her. England wasn’t like America. She felt no scrutinizing eye upon her. But now, to her agitation, they’ve been noticed. Ted has been invited to tea by the bank manager’s wife, whose sixteen-year-old daughter is being primed for university. The town is fawning over him. They’ve all seen his photograph in the dog-eared doctor’s office Vogue; they’ve heard him weekly on the BBC. Now, curious and flattered, they’ve come lowing through the sodden garden, stumbling past the sentinel holly and the intrepid daffodils, batting their eyelashes and shoving their daughters forward, the silly cows. No more casseroles, no crocheted baby hats for Nick. No gifts of January oranges for her confinement or sugared cakes for Frieda. They were coming for Ted Hughes. And he was going. He would go that afternoon and impress them even more, bend over the girlish verse with a kind observation, the loan of a book or a record. While she stays home with the workmen forking their barrows of concrete onto the playroom floor, tracking tar and mud over the bare floorboards in the hall, leaving her no peace, cooped up in the rainy gloom of the drafty house. Endlessly filling the gurgling Bendix, typing Ted’s drafts, taking Ted’s dictation. She stands at the edge of the churchyard regarding her front garden’s forbiddingly high gate, which leads toward the street and the church and past to the village, the roadbed rutted and eroded by god knows how many generations of market-driven hooves before it was finally paved. Flanking the cobbled walk that marks the path from the street to the north church door, the parallel rows of pollarded lime trees are not yet leafy enough to hide their knotty, cankered prunings. They’re stunted and grotesque. But the churchyard yew is full as always, its needles greenblack, its branches impenetrable and upright. It completely hides from Sylvia’s sight the lych-gate behind it where the rector meets coffins on

their pony carts at curbside, the footpath thick with mourners, littered with bruised petals. Her house is a shambles, she thinks, unpresentable, and Ted’s family is coming for Easter. It’s Maundy Thursday now, appropriately: a day for enforced charity. Tomorrow or Saturday they’ll come—Ted’s lazy mother to be waited upon, his spectral, shell-shocked father, even Uncle Fat Pants. She bristles at the injustice of it; she can’t possibly get any work done if she’s pulled into pieces like this, supervising the workmen and the children, entertaining the relatives, fending off the neighbors, coaxing the garden to life in this unrelenting winter, her poems left idling, grinding and pointlessly grinding to no conclusion, engines that won’t turn over. She’s up at two and at six, stupid with lack of sleep. And meanwhile Ted will be off, whetting the fantasies of schoolgirls, ignoring her— Sensing him out of the farthest, intuitive range of her sight, she turns her head to see him looking for her through the parlor’s bay window, between the bookcases, his pale face passing in shadow behind the glass, like a fish swimming just below the surface. Like a fish crossing the shadow of a watcher on the bank, he vanishes, sinking back into the dark of the house. He ignored her when she told him to keep Frieda away from that crow, she remembers, hastily stepping back from the visible edge of the churchyard, turning and squelching through the green mire toward the church. She trudges through a mist, her breath and the damp heat of her body steaming a trail behind her. Squatting in the nascent, crumbledearth garden, holding Frieda still and quiet between his knees, Ted coaxed the crow over; Sylvia watched him, puffing in two layers of jackets over the tennis court, mowing the new lawn in the tensing weather yesterday, the skin of her knuckles cracking in the cold. A morning between rains, and three acres of grass to her knees. She should have stayed at her desk! Her latest batch of pink paper from Smith had just arrived, wheedled from

a former colleague with an office next door to the English Department’s supply closet. But the monotonous weather had become unbearable to her, the black downpours relentless since November, the frigid east wind blowing straight through the heatless house; she couldn’t help herself. To spite her, the momentarily clear sky was loading itself with leaden clouds —predictably—the wind whipping up like a spell. Ted was coaxing the crow, a fledgling baby, sleek feathered, glistening blue-black, hopping on horny twig legs over the red dirt, hesitant. Ted hunched, whispering, encouraging Frieda. “Don’t do it; it might bite,” Sylvia called across the yard, low and again, not so loud as to scare the crow away, a perverse desire to see herself proven right. The crow hopped forward, puzzling, the tips of its wings tucked back over its blunt tail, formal in its cutaway. Frieda’s small, creamy hand was held out flat, leftover toast on her palm, Ted supporting her elbow and nodding. The crow stabbed its sickled beak, snapping, and Frieda shrieked. Sylvia passes the yew tree, its black branches held vertically in surrender, raindrops sheering off as the tree sways in the wind. Her father had held her steady, her eye at the door of the hive. She breathed in the sweet honeyed musk of beeswax. He brooked no mistakes, no opposition; he was an authority. He handed down judgment in red pencil by lamplight each evening, rigid in his leather chair, correcting papers, threatening distress at the lectern next day in his sharp, Germanic baritone. Was this a man, then? Inviting chance, or refusing insurrection? He studied bees because he was poor and had a sweet tooth, he announced. It was no whim. His every action showed strategic ambition. Refusing a bird for the pure serendipity, the curiosity, of a bird? There was only a small, neat drop of blood. Frieda was happy with the novelty of the bandage. Her initial whimpering and panic at the sight of her own blood had transfigured into a grave, third-person recitation about the crow, as if it had happened only remotely to her.

All these daughters—impetuous, primping, boy crazy, angling for attention. Showing up on her doorstep clutching their dreadful school anthologies, peeking around her down the hallway, breathless and babbling, for a glimpse of Ted. These children with no discipline, no core. The interviewer last week had come with two horrid little girls. Despite her instructions, despite her firm warnings, they rampaged through her house during her cheap moment of glory, snatching Frieda’s toys and waking the baby. Sylvia listened to the little girls’ squealing and slamming of doors as the interviewer’s tape wound and unwound on the reel. Chagrined as she was, she also had the uneasy feeling that it was a just punishment for indulging her ego. The BBC hadn’t called her for herself, she suspected; despite her New Yorker contract, despite the grants, her poems were still only trickling into magazines. The Colossus had hardly been reviewed. The producer most likely thought of her because she was Ted’s wife. There would be children screaming in the background. She can see nothing through the mullioned windows of the locked church. There are no lights on inside. The diamond-patterned panes are rain-filmed and murky, virtually opaque. Shouldn’t the church be open? What if someone needs to pray? she wonders. She thinks of knocking the iron sanctuary ring to see if the rector is really inside, spying on her silently through the louvered window in the belfry. Where are her guts? she thinks with scorn. She’s got no self-control; she’s merely looking for excuses to keep from going back to her study to face her unfinished poems. The laundry, mowing the lawn, a crow nip, walking in the rain, a spontaneous urgency to bake—any and all will do. Percy’s crisis next door had satisfied that need most of yesterday. She was doctoring Frieda’s finger in the kitchen, Ted beating a retreat up the stairs, when she heard Rose’s shouting, then the banging on the door. Rose’s hair was crazy and loose. Her buttons undone, she clenched her slip. Percy was having a stroke.

Sylvia hesitated. Ted had turned immediately around and run after Rose toward the cottage. Frieda was methodically gathering and eating the bits of cheese and raisins Sylvia had scattered over a plate to distract her. Nicky was still asleep. She had a sudden vision of Percy in his windbreaker at the foot of the Roman mound as she’d seen him a few days before, coughing thickly into his handkerchief, the elm crusty-barked and stiff next to him, drooping its clusters of callow chartreuse leaves, bloodspotted at their centers, rustling like sistrums. There was a battalion of several thousand slender, green-stalked narcissi at Percy’s feet, their white heads pinging and bouncing in the fine sea-spray drizzle. She imagined him abruptly as an angel, ascending to the churning heavens from the mound, his feet and face and jacket blue, the starry narcissi bowing and waving good-bye, blinking their tiny gold eyes. But it wasn’t going to be like that, and Sylvia knew it. The pull was irresistible. She ran coatless out the door, banging through the back gate. Ted was already on the phone to the doctor in the dim cottage. Sylvia stood behind Rose at the doorway and gaped. Percy was jittering in front of his television as if electrocuted. It was terrifying, priceless material: it was like observing her first electric shock therapy from a casual distance. Had the point been to shake her back into life? That’s not what it had felt like. It felt like an execution. As she watched, Percy had already begun his retreat. He had become an awaited death, diminished, not a person. The trail had forked. Last night she still stood listening at her back door, wiping out pans and eavesdropping on the unseeable comings and goings at the Keyses. The somber, purposeful knocking, the click of the doorjamb, whispers, footsteps slow and even down the lane. The rector? The doctor? Looming over her the moon, a day from full, was snagged in the elm despite the wind’s effort to blow it free. Sylvia stood in its glare and watched it hang, tugging at the branches.

It is a struggle, this mood of dis-ease, this gnawing of dissatisfactions, as helplessly compulsive as the last primitive, rabbit-brain weeks of pregnancy. “Full of yourself—” her mother used to say. “Aren’t you full of yourself—” Admiringly, when she was small. It meant something else later on. She feels belabored, her thoughts disorganized—not empty, like the inexpressible nothing she felt before her breakdown, and after. Nothing like that. Far from that. She has new poems, drafts and drafts of one in particular piling up on her desk, unfurling like a bolt of cloth, sliding in every direction. Why not her? When will it be her? The villagers frown over their rutabagas at the greengrocer’s, casting glances at her and brightening, making up excuses to start a conversation. “Oh, Mrs. Hughes —” She wonders if it was even Ted who suggested her for the BBC broadcast. Again! She hates the thing inside of herself that knows the bottom and nothing else. It’s her own faulty character, this disorder of her heart. She needs to get back. Nicholas must be stirring by now; her breasts prickle, hard and tight with milk. Sylvia turns the corner of the church, toward the south porch, and her elm and her home come back into view. Flinty headstones teeter in every direction; the cobblestones are brightly mortared with moss. Rainwater gullies over the uneven pathway. She hears the oceanic boom of the tree crashing around past Court Green’s roofline, like a wave curling up over the house. Someday someone would find the elm still there, its roots deep in the foot of the Iron Age hill. Archaeologists would come looking for it. They would punt out in their skiffs down the undersea A30 and beach on the shores of the mound, its moat filled and flooded to encompass all of what had been Court Green. Her three submerged acres would lie at the bottom of the pool, the cob walls, the reed-and-wheat straw thatching all crumbled to fish waste. And there beneath the rippling surface, amid the frilled white reflections of the narcissi and the jagged elm leaves floating on the water, they would

see her disintegrated life—her Dutch tea set in shards, her sewing machine florid with rust. All at the slimy, red-earthed bottom, all decomposing, all but the elm. The smoke-blackened, hand-sawn Elizabethan elm rafters from Ted’s attic; the thick, six-foot elm plank that was her writing desk; the three-trunked elm itself: inscrutable, impervious, perfectly preserved, like the bog men found with hair still growing, undigested seeds in their intestines thousands of years after they sank from view. It was good for coffins and wagon wheels. The elm, immutable, would outlast them all. The rain beads the dark dome of Sylvia’s umbrella, gathering at the dentate edge and dropping to the ground in crystalline, elliptical chains before her face as she raises her eyes. The granite bell tower, the most ancient feature of the church, looms at her shoulder, its Norman walls spattered with celadon flecks of lichen, like a painter’s drop cloth. Under the oak-shingled spire, eight bells wait for Sunday; a ninth sanctus bell rings the hours all week long. Twenty feet up the south side of the tower, a sundial melts into the wall, hardly noticeable, camouflaged by its abiding stone face and weathered wooden frame the exact gray of the granite of the tower. Its lines of declination fan outward in rays, predicting the movement of the sun; its iron gnomon, purposeless today, bleeds a ruddy stain onto the tower wall. Engraved across the top of the dial plate is a motto: LIFE IS LIKE A SHADOW. Sylvia reads it, considering its dense music, its fugue. “Life is like a shadow”: she speaks it aloud, plucking it out, considering. “Love is like a shadow,” she says. The words fill her mouth. OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER THIRTEEN “The Night Dances” DECEMBER 14–15, 1962 LONDON She should have known: The endless tears. The long, long naps, today and yesterday. Then tonight’s comfortless supper. “Please—” she fantasized pleading as the three of them crouched miserably together at the little table in the kitchen. Trying vainly to capture his red-faced, wailing attention, begging: “Please—” She watched him wearily, held his dripping spoon for him; she waited with it, suspended, as he shrieked. An inconsolable tyrant, catastrophic in his terrycloth bib, his soft crew cut of neutral-toned baby hair standing upright in indignant outrage. Frieda, bearded with stew, merely looked on, a mildly interested gawker. Afterward, the sobbing, effortless collapse, a matter of minutes. She should have known. She could have guessed. Part of her did know—once both babies were in their cots, she simply didn’t take the sleeping pill. A glass of brandy imported up the stairs and her papers hurriedly fanned out on the bed: the typed final drafts of the new poems, the ones still bound for the manuscript, spread over the coverlet to be sorted. A working table of contents, mostly blank, and the ledger of those she’d already sent to magazines or sold open on her desk before the window; a set of carbons to submit, and her latest maroon journal for updating. Too much for one night, even with a second wind. But she willed it, books and brandy and papers arrayed around her, warding off interruption. She

picked off the easy targets first: matching poems to the magazines most likely to buy them. She banged out letters at the same time, nothing before her but her own pale, hectic ghost on the black glass, raindrops trailing silver down the panes. The worn, rewound end of the typewriter ribbon grew fainter with each keystroke. The words faded, barely brushing the surface of the bond. She hit the keys harder, her stiff fingers icy. She crammed every last cheery reassurance and breezy, tactical quip onto the pages, manually aligning the sheets when they got too close to the paper’s edge to advance on the rubber platen, filling in words by hand around the aerogram spaces left for her mother’s address or Mrs. Prouty’s. She warmed to the shell game of poem sequence playing in her head. She was no failure—look: The New Yorker has taken “Amnesiac,” The Observer would publish “Ariel” and “Event,” Punch wants an essay. The stack of letters and submissions grew as the tide line in her brandy glass receded: fat envelopes addressed to her family, London Magazine, the New Statesman, The Atlantic, the Third Programme, all efficiently stamped and ready to be posted tomorrow. I’m here, they all announced; here’s proof. And finally, with mathematical predictability—a cry, but odd. She could have guessed. She feels it in her nerves before he even stirs. Still that primordial instinct remains intact, the one that so many times before had gotten her up and shambling from the bed, the bodice of her nightgown dampening within from the fine milky spray aroused by the mere rustle of a wakening baby. Cautiously, holding her breath, hoping for reprieve, she opens the children’s door from the bright, chill hallway. Nicholas is sitting up in his cot in the dark. Frieda remains resolutely asleep, her long-lashed eyelids clamped together despite Nicky’s wail and the faint, angled blue glow of moon and street lamp cutting across the floor. Nick’s bedding is wet, but with something having the texture of runny, tepid oatmeal. He vomits again as she lifts him out of the crib.

*   *   * She rocks him, little oven, sponged now and calmed, very slowly, side to side, from her hips, the light low and contained, billowing from the candles left over since moving day. Nick is heavy, limp with fever, sobering as black coffee; he sinks his full weight into her shoulder, into the cradle of her crooked elbow, slowing his mother to the pace he needs. Sylvia lets his weight anchor her. She breathes him in, the unfamiliar odor of sickness on his skin threaded by the sharp fresh scent of soap. The candlelight flares and shrinks with her slow rocking, with the heater’s draft. The candlelight flares and shrinks, throwing its inconstant spotlight in turn on her typewriter, arrested; the welter of smelly crib sheets and pajamas, damp towels piled into the laundry basket; the bed still papered with poems, a random mosaic of pink and white tesserae, blind to each other as kittens. Is she here, or there? She’s stopped, subjective, in this shadow play. He found her out. He hauled her back to wordlessness, back into the body they both still inhabit. She holds him over her heart, pressing against her breast and collarbone, feeling the tension in his small body fade at the mere touch of hers. It feels like relief to her also, the wonder of unresistant physical contact. Her own body is a desiccated thing, a bone house, deprived of the elements necessary for its survival. Skin on her skin. Warmth. Sustenance. Could you die from this? she wonders. Could you die if no one ever touches you? She feels corrupt, finding such covert, selfish satisfaction in her baby’s feverish body, the compact comfort, the hot, yeasty loaf. His fat, foreshortened feet dangle at her lowest rib, kicking her lightly; his inexplicably filthy ear blazes against her neck. That heat—it’s life flaming through. At their births, it was her children’s startling heat and heft she was stunned by, their solid human otherness: Frieda’s narrow infant shoulders creamy with vernix, like a channel swimmer’s. Their slow unfolding, over days and weeks, after all that time

curled inside her, wrinkled and red as poppies. Their newborn faces, roving in sleep—smiling, frowning, grimacing, eyelids fluttering, trying all the different frequencies of emotion for the first time. Their faces now, so often unreadable, leaving her to guess. “Dat!” Frieda will shout, excited, exasperated, pointing to something she hasn’t yet learned to name. “Dat!” Nick mimics, “dat, dat!” Merely pleased by the form of a sound he can master. But before language, before words, all they know is corporeal, measured by their bodies and by hers. She should have read it in his torrid little face—at dinner, the post office, before. Nicholas doesn’t sleep but drifts, tensing and digging his jaw into her neck when she falters, stepping even slightly out of the soothing, metronomic dance she’s set in motion, her body their pendulum. She rocks her baby side to side, side to side. Her fingertips memorize the rough spot at the back of his head where his hair has rubbed off. He needs her now. She leaves the poems where they are. *   *   * Feverish, a child takes on an eerie, radiant beauty, its skin even more lush, dry with the consuming inner fire of a cinder, velveted as the lips of a foal. With a warm damp cloth sprinkled with rosewater, she swabs Frieda’s forehead, smoothing the fine minky hair at her temples, running the tip of the cloth over the graceful contours of her daughter’s small face. Rosenwasser for Christmas cookies, for handkerchiefs, for a child’s fever. Nicholas is restively asleep beside his sister, his hold on his mother a slackening knot that eased just enough as Sylvia heard Frieda call for her, and gag— She takes the cuff of the top sheet between her fingertips and eases it down, revealing Frieda’s bare chest, thin and blue as milk and bowed, well made, like the bottom of a boat. Sylvia sweeps the damp cloth lightly over Frieda’s skin to cool her. The little girl is burning, alarmingly so, though Sylvia has not been able to look for the thermometer or the rubbing

alcohol, still packed in one of the boxes downstairs in the parlor. She is afraid to leave her children for that long, afraid that Nick will fall out of the bed, afraid that Frieda will have to vomit again before she can bound up the stairs to help, and their only place of comfort, the only place she can care for them both at once, will be irretrievably soiled. She has no more clean sheets; all she brought from Court Green have been used up over the week in the babies’ room. Now they molder inside her wet pillow slips in the pram at the bottom of the stairwell. Under the soft gilding light of the candles, Frieda opens her eyes and gazes into her mother’s face. Bending over her child, moving the cloth gently over her skin, Sylvia sees herself reflected in Frieda’s guileless blue eyes, glassy with fever, as her own shadow grows up the wall, a mountainous giant of head and shoulders, taller and wider than the windows. Frieda looks so little once more, no toddler now but merely a baby, her body a neat, vulnerable package, lost among the bedclothes as she so often seemed as a newborn, her skull like the skull of a bird’s. Delicate and brittle as the skull of a bird. Guilt clutches Sylvia’s heart as she waits for Frieda to ask again for Ted. But Frieda doesn’t, not tonight, not in the still, broad hours of this endless night. Her whole world is here, reflected in her eyes—all she knows of safety and love. Her whole world has shrunk to the aureole of a candle, to the feel of her mother’s hand against her burning cheek. Again, as before they left her breast, Sylvia is the empire, complete. This Frieda is not the child who is learning to tell secrets all by herself—cupping her hand at a willing ear, blowing into it an incomprehensible roar that modulates to a whispered non sequitur delivered with pride: “psst—a bee,” “psst—a cloud,” though that child will be back tomorrow, or the next day. This Frieda is the child who once sat on her mother’s lap, a wristwatch held to her ear for the very first time: her tender little face first blank, then flowering into a laugh, hearing the tick.

It is this responsibility, this power she wields, that Sylvia can hardly bear: she is, in every practical sense, all they have. She is the boundless shadow looming over them. They rest fitfully inside it now, her giant darkening the crown molding, blown up the wall behind the headboard. They are so tiny—their sweaty hair plastered to their scalps, their quick, illuminated breathing. Her heart wells with a sorrowful, guilty love, a tart hurt she can taste, this grief for all she lacks. There is no one to hear them, no one to come to their aid; there is no sleep, no father, no phone, no rescue. *   *   * Morning flares blue, then copper, then white, like the flame of a candle. Light arcs unmitigated across space, through the bald windows and over the blank walls of Sylvia’s bedroom, shadow to shadow, as the day languidly expands and passes. The children are sick, are weepy, are listless, are fussy, are bored. Sylvia misses her piano. She sings to them, hums her tone-deaf lullabies, finger plays the German singsongs of her childhood. The mesmeric, plaintive Lorelei coax naps from their rock on the Rhine. “‘Help me! Help me! Help me!’ he cried…” jump Sylvia’s two fingers, slim rabbit ears chased by a huntsman over the blanket. She guesses at what might comfort and amuse: cool applesauce. Soupspoonfuls of rosehip syrup, tangy and sweet. Mugs of diluted blackcurrant juice that she’s warmed on the stove, another of her grandmother’s remedies, good for the tummy. Dry toast cut into animal shapes with cookie cutters. Storybooks no one has the patience for. When did she become so porous? The pink occident light of declining afternoon filters the cloistered world of the bedroom where she nurses her sick babies, flushing her closet door, her pillow shams, the pearly candle nubs, the children’s sleeping faces with a pacific, rosy luster. She cannot remember when, exactly, since yesterday, her body and her needs

so completely shaped themselves to her children’s, when motherhood overflowed its banks and carried her, willingly, deep into its current. When did she change into a nightgown, pleating it into a thick tube between her hands, like stockings, and dropping it over her head in one efficient move? When did she gather the puzzles, the diapers, the bottles, the cups and plates? When did she collect the heap of new poems, loose sheets hastily plucked off the bedclothes and weighted beneath a candlestick on the bedside table, and shove them into the drawer of her desk, dismissing the idea that she might try to work while the children rested—impossible—in unison? When did she squeeze into bed with them, capturing one under each arm, nosing their sour little heads like bouquets, like the perfumes of a rare flower? Like the seductions of a night lily, like the potent pink dust of the stargazer. Sleep swells as she breathes in the breath of her hot babies. It rocks her at the surface of awareness, rocks her until she slips under, too. *   *   * She revolves on an island, floats and rocks in a cold gray December jelly churning a mash of salty ice into chunks at its surface. The stars rearrange and fade, throwing the shadows of passing planets on the wall. The stars fall, hurtling through a black heaven, white-hot flakes of pain bursting inside her eyes, blistering her head, making her sick. I remember this, she dreams. I remember this, her stomach heaving. OceanofPDF.com

CHAPTER FOURTEEN “The Detective” DECEMBER 16, 1962 LONDON She’s ruined, gray and mottled as something gone very bad, her head and gut full of the foulest, most unthinkable garbage. No, her head is full of pulsating, metallic rot; her gut is utterly emptied, gagged to the last fleck, down to her scraped-out bare toes. She has been sick all night, clutching the porcelain rim of the toilet, virally poisoned, retching, weaving fever dreams, her unhinged mind rambling over weird, ghastly scenes. Snails crawling over the bathroom walls wearing the faces of Ted and that woman, their sluggish moist tracks glistening on the tiles. Their sidelong eye-slide of lies, their miniaturized fear of tumbling into the foamy acrid soup in the commode. Or she and Frieda and Nicholas a rick of bones, heaped together on the dusty bedclothes, discovered months from now by the two leasing agents in their matching dark suits and bowlers, their twin faces verdigris’d as the faces of undertakers. She sprawled, convulsing, on the relievedly cold floor in the loo, Nicholas and Frieda unaware and dead to the world upstairs, exhausted themselves from their own influenza ordeals, collapsed on her bed, the mattress of which she managed to drag—how? by what superhuman effort?—onto the floor of the nursery in the morning. And lay there all day, sipping water from a cup, shivering and sweating, the babies tossing and muttering beside her,

taking turns in their cots. She lay immobilized, flinching at the sound of the children’s penetrating, mosquitoey voices. Night, again, has ground itself around. She has made it all the way downstairs, shaky, sallow, barefoot, in her nightgown, each step an excruciating jolt to her frangible head, with her wastepaper bin from the kitchen and a note for the nappy service man. In a sudden, brief spasm of clarity, Sylvia’s remembered that the rubbish truck comes Monday morning and so will the nappy man. She hasn’t the strength for two round trips down the staircase to the entrance hall, one with the trash and one with the heavy, awkward diaper pail, though the flat reeks of rotting rubbish and all the week’s diapers are used up, the children bare bottomed. It is beyond all human comprehension that she might even attempt to rinse the stinking nappies. But she has switched off the stairway light to spare her eyes, her blinding headache a blacksmith’s anvil banging and sparking her brainpan, and she has tacked her note to the house’s front door, asking the nappy man to ring and wait while she brings the soileds down in the morning. In the phosphorescent glow of the moon beaming a shard of bluish light through the front door transom, Sylvia tamps her trash into the mysteriously full bin behind her pram, under the dark stairwell. “What are you doing with my rubbish bin?” Sylvia startles at the sudden bark of a man’s voice behind her, and the bright light just as suddenly shining at her back, as if she were the subject of a criminal pursuit. She turns around, squinting. A middle-aged man with tiny, wire-rimmed bifocals is frowning and narrowing his eyes at her disapprovingly, standing with an ordnance map in the open doorway of the house’s ground-floor flat. Behind him are unpacked cartons, stacks of paintings with their stretchers showing leaned against men’s-clubby furniture. A radio natters in another room.

“I ask you again, madam, what are you doing with my rubbish bin?” he demands. “I—I—I’m sorry, I thought it was put here by the agents,” Sylvia stammers, clanking the lid carefully—painfully—back down on the can. “You are mistaken, madam. The leasing agents have provided no such convenience. I was told, and I presume you were also told, that the tenants are to purchase their own rubbish bins.” “I’m sorry,” Sylvia apologizes, her head pounding. “I’ve just moved in this week. I didn’t realize.” The man surveys her unhappily. “You must be Mrs. Hughes. I was told a Mr. and Mrs. Hughes had been given the larger flat because—” he pauses, continuing to inspect her, “because of their ‘greater need,’ as the agents termed it.” Sylvia stands uncomfortably, clammy skinned and unwell. “I was told you have two children,” the man continues. “I do,” Sylvia answers, breathing shallowly, “two small babies, two years and almost one. They’re upstairs. We’ve all come down with the flu.” “Yes, I thought I heard babies crying.” The man nods almost imperceptibly, considering this deduction, crossing his arms before his saggy brown suit. “So your husband is upstairs?” he asks. For a moment, Sylvia eyes the man just as steadily. “No, he’s not,” she answers, offering nothing more, too beleaguered to work up any explanations at all. The man watches her. “I also required the larger flat,” he says, meting out his words slowly. “In fact, I have it confirmed in no uncertain terms that I saw the first-floor flat and expressed my interest in it before you did. Nevertheless, the agents approved your application rather than mine, and my two growing sons will have to sleep on bunk beds.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Sylvia responds weakly, wincing with effort. “Perhaps it was a matter of credentials. My mother was my reference. She’s a professor in America. She has very impressive credentials.” Disdainfully, sniffing audibly and looking down at her over the tops of his bifocals, the man scoffs. “I am also a professor, as well as an international scholar of art. I have also lived in America, where I was appointed the art critic for the Buffalo Evening News. My credentials are impeccable. No,” he continues, his voice dropping, mumbling to himself and gazing vacantly at his ordnance map, “no … it was clearly something else.” “I’m sorry, but I’m very ill; I really must get back upstairs,” Sylvia whispers, feeling the blood drain from her face as an ominous percolation starts deep in her intestines. She takes a step forward toward the foot of the staircase. “May I ask where you moved from?” the man asks with sudden urgency, still standing fully in his doorway, leaving only a matter of impassable inches between himself and the oversized pram. “Devonshire. Just north of Dartmoor.” He nods knowingly. “My wife has left me for a man from Cornwall.” He glowers with hostility at the map in his hands. “‘As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor.’ So said Holmes. He also said a concentrated atmosphere elicits a concentration of thought, but I disagree.” Sylvia nods hollowly, single-minded to get back up the stairs. She takes another step toward her neighbor, whose intractable position remains the insurmountable obstacle. “How much rent are you paying?” he blurts. Taken aback, her bowels churning, Sylvia stammers again, “I’m not exactly sure—I don’t remember—I made out a check for the full year in

advance—” “Aha,” he says, smiling, looking grim and pleased. His eyes glitter tinnily behind the lenses of his glasses. “No wonder they considered your need to be greater than mine.” Sylvia stares at him blankly. She would have done anything to get Yeats’s house. She cabled her mother straightaway; she cleared the savings account. No one could have possibly needed this house more than she did. Her neighbor does not move aside, fixing her instead with his unpleasant smile, relishing this exhumation of diabolical skulduggery, when his face begins to knead into a grimace. “What is that infernal smell?” he asks, sniffing the close hallway air. Sylvia, her conjested head impenetrable, cannot smell a thing, though she fears the culprit can only be her basket of vomitous trash, or her rotting wet laundry still packed into the pram, or herself. She folds her arms over her chest, furtively ashamed, hugging her flannel nightgown to her skin in the cold. Her neighbor scowls at the cumbersome pram before him. “Why don’t you move this perambulator into your own flat?” he complains bitterly. “As you can see, it’s blocking the corridor. This isn’t your private storage, you know, this is public space. The lease reads that we are to keep this area clear.” “But I can’t move it upstairs—it’s too big and heavy,” Sylvia responds, incredulous, hopelessness whinging her voice. “Then you should get a smaller one.” “—I have to have it—I need it—” she appeals, “how else can I manage my errands and my shopping with the children?” “Have your husband help you,” the man pronounces. “But my husband isn’t here,” Sylvia says, her head thudding at what seems an impossible argument, doubly impossible to resolve in her

enervated state. She pauses, gathering the remnants of her strength. “Excuse me, Mister—?” “Professor Thomas.” “Professor Thomas, perhaps you could do me a small kindness. I’m expecting my nappy service and my husband tomorrow—he’s been away on business. He doesn’t have keys. When they ring, could you let them in? My husband will move the pram. I’m so sick, you see—” “I simply can’t,” he crisply replies. “If I haven’t already left for work, I can’t imagine that I could hear your bell. I’ve been nearly deaf since I was a youth.” “But—you heard my babies crying—” “Mrs. Hughes,” Professor Thomas sniffs, “if you are so sick, why aren’t you properly dressed? Where is your dressing gown?” “I just came down with the trash—” Sylvia explains, reddening like a chastised child, her head reeling, “—I thought the ground-floor flat was vacant—” “Aha,” Professor Thomas cuts her off, brandishing his ordnance map as if to silence her, “but as you can plainly see,” sweeping his arm across the threshold to his open parlor, “I’ve been squashed into a flat too small —to satisfy your ‘greater need’—and as I have two impressionable sons who visit, I can’t risk any scandal.” He assesses Sylvia, eyes her clutching her nightgown. “Evidently you have many resources on which to call for favors. I, however, cannot allow any false conclusions to be drawn. Good night.” With an air of victorious finality, he steps back into the doorway of his brilliantly lit flat to let her pass. Sylvia hurries past him, as much as she is able, hunched over, holding her wastebasket and her gathered nightgown, queasy, her face blenched and glazing with perspiration. She rounds the staircase’s turned newel post and seizes the banister, stepping gingerly up each riser, feeling his cold eyes on her back as she retreats up the stairs into the darkness.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN “Ariel” OCTOBER 27, 1962 COURT GREEN The frozen breath of horses, smoking in the cold violet dark of a nearly deserted stable. A spray of fading stars, an argentine flake of moon melt in rectangles of glassy black on the icy cobbles of the open yard. It is nearly sunrise, the morning after a hard frost, low autumn fog packing the riverbeds and the cleaves of heath-covered hills and blanketing the sunken fields. Sylvia carries her saddle and tack over her forearms, lays the burnished leather saddle and stable rubber on the rack to the side of a turquoise stall door. Inside, assembling out of the blackness, the ears of a chestnut mare, gray muzzled, her blaze flecked with mud, pivot separately, then swivel in Sylvia’s direction. At the far end of the row of stalls another door is already open, a pitchfork leaning against the wall, a single bare bulb on a dangling cord glaring from the rafters of the pitched barn roof. There is a clanking of metal: grain canisters, water buckets. Horses nicker like gassy uncles, swish their long, coarse tails, crunch oats and sugar-beet pulp and hay suspended from nets in the corners of their stalls. Sylvia slides the iron bolt on the lower half of the Dutch door and nudges it open with the toe of her boot, holding cross ties and a halter in her hands, her tender left thumb heavily bandaged and stiff. Her regular horse stands in the indistinct light of the stall: a steady and mildtempered cob, a cross of Dartmoor pony and farm horse, ruddy-coated

and aging, wearing a green blanket, her winter coat long and her thick, short legs shaggy, unclipped for added insulation against the cold. A good teaching horse for a beginner. Always work the horse’s near side, the left. Sylvia steps into the stall, approaching the horse from the left, and stands at the animal’s shoulder, stroking the platelike disk of her cheek, her crooked white blaze, looking into her enormous, placid brown eye. This is old Ariel, the horse on which Sylvia takes her weekly riding lessons, this day’s Night Mare, not mythically perched in a yew tree, nested in the scattered jawbones of poets, but instead dozing in oat straw and crumbly fresh manure. A sharp ammonia stink rises from the floor of the stall, a green vegetal fragrance, granular and toasty, not unpleasant. She pats the horse’s jaw a last time, then fits the loose framework of the halter up over Ariel’s face. Footsteps sound down the covered stableway. It is the teenage daughter of the riding instructor, holding a stack of loose flakes of oat hay in her arms, wearing tall, black rubber boots with a red seam running around the sole. “Going for a hack this early?” she asks Sylvia in a stage whisper, deferring to the early quiet, hugging the load of feed to her quilted jacket. “Just for a walk in the pasture, past the river,” Sylvia whispers briskly, occupied with her tasks, moving with confidence around the horse, focused and efficient, clipping the second of the cross ties to a ring at the right side of the stall, stooping under the rope at the mare’s shoulder and unhooking the blanket at her chest. Safety first. Remove blankets back to front. The horse shudders daintily, her coat and thick skin rippling, as her blanket comes off. “Good thing I haven’t brought her feed yet, then,” the girl replies. “When you’re back and she’s cool, could you give her crushed oats and half a flake of hay? I’ll scrub her water bucket.”

Sylvia nods. She’s folded the blanket and put it away on a high shelf at the front of the stall, then stepped toward the door, where she left the brushes and currycomb. As the girl walks away, Sylvia takes up the brushes, loosening the caked, dried mud from the horse’s coat with a gentle, circular massage. She brushes neck and belly and loins as the horse patiently submits, turning her impassive head to watch. Everyday life is out of sight, three miles away up the road. The whole world is still. There is no threat of intrusion. The children are asleep at home with Sue; no one will miss her. She’ll be back before breakfast. No one even knows she is gone—her mother’s anxious, sententious letters can’t find her here; Ted’s insults can’t find her. She’s inviolable, indestructible in a stonewalled Dartmoor stable. Sylvia draws the brush over the teeth of the currycomb, knocking loose the dirt and the shedding, auburn hair. She runs her hand reassuringly over the mare’s left flank as she crosses her broad hindquarters to brush the horse’s off side. No more of Ted’s pedantic directives: Study King Lear for an hour. Think for an hour. Write for an hour. Who was sentimental, the charge he’d condemned her with? She, stripping away all artifice and falsity, ripping history and familiar comforts to shreds, risking everything, or he, carrying the same life everywhere? His lumbering West Yorkshire mouthings, his rods and reels and fanatical fish visions. His chipped Beethoven records, over and over and over on that antiquated gramophone. When he left, he took all of who he’d been for most of his life; he hauled it off in a few boxes. All, or nearly, that he’d brought to their marriage. Good riddance. No one, ever again, will tell her what to do or who she is. Sylvia ducks under the cross ties once more to exchange the brushes for Ariel’s bridle. A rooster crows, disembodied in the limitless distance of bruisy dark. The high northern uplands of Dartmoor, a paddock’s length away on the other side of the Taw, are a firewall holding back the hot crimson flare of morning. Cawsand Beacon, over two

thousand feet above the sea, broods above the shadowed village of Belstone. Its densely wooded foot and hillside common spread along the riverbed, not much more than a swift stream here, close to its marshy source, though the Taw widens and matures as it travels the forty miles through farmland toward Barnstaple Bay on the northwest coast of Devon. On a clear day, from the top of the hill, you can follow the river’s path all the way to the Atlantic, to Appledore and the sandy western beaches. It is her birthday. She is thirty years old. She’s been waiting, watching this movie unreel in her head since she started her lessons two months ago. She’s going to ride to the top of the highest hill in southwest England, arriving with the sun on the anniversary of her birth. The morning of her rebirth: the start of another life, like a cat. The mare stands nearly free, halter unbuckled and refastened around her throat as Sylvia lifts the bridle reins over her keen ears and neck and eases the jointed snaffle bit into her tractable mouth. She smooths the felted cavesson, buckles the cheek pieces, the throat lash; attaches the curb chain. She collects the blue-and-white-checked rubber- and wool-stuffed saddle from the rack, carrying it back to Ariel over her arm, the hornless pommel at her elbow, and lifts it up over the horse’s withers and shoulder blades. Slide the saddle back, with the coat, not against. The children deserve security, her mother writes. You should come home. You should get a job teaching. You should be brave and ladylike and passive, be like your mother, make a martyr of yourself. Make sacrifices; control your emotions. Hold it in. Hold it in till you bleed. Your father took over the dining room to write his book on bees; every night for a year I diagrammed the arrangement of his papers before I moved them off the table for supper. Marriage is a compromise. It was infuriating. The children deserve plenty—but what do I deserve? Sylvia contests. Why is the woman always expected to give up on life? She’s a writer, not a teacher. She can; she does. She is the arrow, not him, nor him, nor him,

these men who would have her be charming and quiet, reciting the names of insects in Latin, stirring something at a stove. Her mother is ashamed— her daughter’s marriage an unholy mess of adultery and mayhem, and now she’s turning up her nose at golden opportunities to slink meekly away, to be clutched to the suffocating bosom of her loving, sacrificing family—just as she was ashamed of Sylvia’s breakdown. She’d be even more ashamed if she knew it was Aurelia whom Sylvia had really wanted to kill: her nagging, selfless mother and the whole tribunal of faultfinders sitting in judgment of her, for whom she performed like a circus act. The lady on bareback, circling and circling for the kibitzers, the critics with their fat red pens, and getting nowhere. Ashamed and afraid, that’s what her mother’s letters convey. Wringing her hands over the Atlantic. Afraid of life, of anything that isn’t neat and proper, of Sylvia’s ferocity most of all. Bombus impatiens. Bombus perplexus. Bombus fervidus. Sylvia buckles the girth, pulling it snug around the mare’s generous belly. One notch at a time—don’t pinch. Gently she slides her fingers under the wide band, smoothing the leather and skin. Sylvia has nothing to fear; she’s come through a Kesselschlacht, a burning cauldron of hell, her own Stalingrad, and she’s pure passionate righteousness on the other side. No apologies. She’s finished proofreading the pages of The Bell Jar. The book has already gone to the printer; there’s no turning back. She wrote “Daddy” the day after Ted left, “Medusa” last week during her fever. She’s purged of sufferings. The sacrifices are over. “All right, you sprite,” Sylvia addresses the elderly horse, her tone low and soothing, as she hangs the loose halter over the wall of the stall and takes the reins in her right hand, leading the saddled mare out through the doorway and into the silvered yard. The night sky is withdrawing by degrees, the broad dome of Cawsand Hill a languorous, ultramarine sweep hovering over the corrugated tin roofline of the stable. Ariel’s shoes click on the cobblestones. Sylvia swings the stock gate open and leads the horse

out onto the bridle path that runs, bordered by impenetrable hedgerows, between the paddocks down to the river. A grizzled granite fence encloses the stable: the fence, the stone side of the barn, the bare limbs and rough trunks of the trees, the pitch of the roof closest to the moors all blanketed by avidly green moss. At the fence post, where Sylvia turns her horse around and ties her to the gate for mounting, a flaking hand-painted sign warns ALL RIDES AT OWN RISK!! Beside it, hung along the length of the fence on barbed wire, are the mossy skulls and curling horns of bygone Dartmoor sheep, their perfect, human teeth gleaming in the emerging pale blue light. Sylvia checks her saddle, slips the stirrup irons down their leathers. Holding the reins in her left hand, she grips a shank of brown mane low on the horse’s neck and fits her left foot into the near stirrup iron, bracing her right hand on the saddle and taking a couple of hops before launching up and onto the horse’s back, amazed, as always, when she’s done it. Heels down, toes up, weight on stirrups. Reins in the near hand only. Settling into the saddle with the reins clear of her bad thumb, Sylvia gives Ariel’s sides a tap with her lower legs. The horse doesn’t move. Sylvia tries again, pivoting her heels and her knees exactly as she’s been taught, thighs tight to the saddle, giving the horse a squeeze with her calves. Ariel takes a step and begins to walk heavily down the muddy, leaf-strewn track. The slow clumping of Ariel’s hooves on the damp grit reminds Sylvia of something: a hand clapped again and again over a telephone receiver. Head bobbing in sync with her dilatory gait, her mouth reluctantly sensitive to her rider’s hands, ears twitching independently to noiseless noises, the horse’s neck is the split frame for all that Sylvia sees. On either side the hedgerows slump, propped up by the stooping rowans and hazels planted behind them, as if exhausted by the effort of holding back the relentless winds of the moors. Despite the prickly deterrents of whitethorn and blackthorn and wild rose, some village sheep have scaled